Planning a Trip to the Boundary Waters: An Essential Guide to Exploring the BWCAW

GoFastGirl: This is a great beginning resource to the BWCAW. And it's now nearly 20 years old and would greatly benefit from a new edition. I'm on the fence whether I'll keep it or not for that reason.

United States on Aug 11, 2022

Amazon Customer: This is the best single guide for both planning what you’ll need, and where/how to go in the BWCA. Be advised it is mostly a trip planner, with suggested routes from all sorts of different entry points, but also has basic what to bring/how to pack info as well. However the trip planners are great, and far superior to the Beymer guides for a few reasons:
1. The Beymer guides have no maps. This book has small maps for each subsection of the BWCA, which makes it much easier to plan potential variations on the suggested trips. You would never use the maps to actually navigate in the BWCA, but having a rough idea of the geography is helpful without having to invest in an entire Fisher map collection
2. It ranks portages on a difficulty scale, incorporating length, trail quality, elevation gain, etc. I’ve found these to be pretty accurate.
3. The suggested routes are much better described. This is my subjective experience, but I found the Beymer guide useless for trip planning. I’ve already done 2 with this book, and am planning on more.

United States on Aug 29, 2021

Ginger Folker: When i first opened the book I was a bit disappointed cause it didn't have colorful pictures. But as i flipped through it i realized the wealth of information it contained. Its a great book to pair with the Boundary Waters Canoe Camping book (it has pretty pictures and more info on other things you need to know about the boundary waters besides just the portages). This book has all the portage information which is a HUGE help when trying to plan out a trip. This is our first time going to the boundary waters and having a book like this is super helpful in determining routes that we think we can handle. Its easy to navigate through as well because of the index. If you are reading about a portage on the internet or in another book and you want to know what its like all you had to do is find it in the index and you will then know all you need to know about that portage. Its a great reference book and a must have for planning a boundary waters trip.

United States on Feb 25, 2015

goaljohnbill: While a long time vet of paddling and trip planning I am new to the BWCA and this book was the first one that layed things out in such a way as to really get a feel for what trips were like. I had rented every book my library had on the subject with any trip descriptions and/or maps (5-6 total) and this was by far the one that felt most useful to me (including the 2 book series split into east and west regions).
The descriptions and relative portage difficulty rankings are well written and informative. The maps are more an overview than detailed (using these as your only mapping seems like a pretty bad idea...) but are fine as an overview. Plus they are presented better than the others Id seen in different books. The issue with the routes not being marked at all is a bit of a hassle but i think it is better than covering the maps with "squiggles" since multiple routes are normally described off of each section of map.
Overall a highly recommended item that I expect to use as a planning starter over and over.

United States on Oct 05, 2012

randy hartmann: We're planning a Boy Scout trip to the BWCAW for 2011 and really didn't know much about the area, the routes we wanted to take, fishing, etc. This book covers everything. While it does not cover every possible route a paddler could take it goes into great depth for the more popular ones. It was nice to be able to read about what you might expect in the way of scenery, especially after the Blowdown of 1999 and many of the subsequent fires. It's obvious that the author went to great lengths to try and put the reader right into the area as they read about a location. The one drawback that I did find was that, unless you were actually holding a map of the BWCAW right in front of you while reading, it was hard to figure out where the routes and portages were. It would have been very helpful to have a picture/map associated with each of the routes described so the reader could follow along. Otherwise, this was an exceptional resource.

United States on Jan 08, 2011